When Pari could not afford to think about the ache in her feet and shoulders as she walked, her mind had to go somewhere else, so instead she would think, “We are playing giuthi again.”
Or, “still.”
Every few years for as long as she could remember, her family picked up everything they could carry and traveled to live somewhere new. They dropped things along the way as they went—things too bulky to bring along: a house, some cousins, a handful of friends, a favorite bakery, a good shady tree.
Pari thought, each time we go, it is as though everything I am is dwindling away, no matter how hard I try to carry all my old life along with me. Then we land somewhere and start gathering it all up again—new house, new marketplace, new friends, new languages. And then, off we go, one town to the next, dropping memories like glass seeds into the little cups of the wooden giuthi board. The purpose of our game is to keep traveling, hoping a few treasures will someday wind up in our hoard. (glow.jpg)
Pari had trouble keeping track of who her family was playing against anymore.
The king’s soldiers used to get drunk and burn a few houses, rape a few girls, and her family had been cautious enough to keep moving further away from wherever they were stationed. When new armies marched across the land with a bold red flag and the king’s gyrfalcon banner fell, she privately rejoiced to see their red flag raised in its place.
Her father drew her close and quietly told her a fable about foolish pigeons who hired a hawk to protect them from a falcon, only to find the hawk ate more pigeons in a day than the falcon had in a year.
But the red flag soldiers never raped or burned, except on official business. The red soldiers leveled the worship house and replaced it with a theater to show State-approved plays, but they left Pari’s family alone, as long as they dressed like everyone else and did no praying. Her family was very careful never to be anyone’s official business.
The red soldiers gave everyone papers that said they had to stay put wherever they were, and Pari did not mind that one bit. Three years they had stayed in that place, and it seemed like forever. But then the red soldiers issued new papers that said the family must move to a different place. And then again, and again, and again, every year or so. They kept shuffling all the families around as if trying to find places where they would fit, but not too well, and not for too long. The red soldiers didn’t like it when families had loyalties to each other instead of to the red flag.
And then in the terrible summer, the brown soldiers came on their motorcycles and butchered the red soldiers. The head of the hawk was severed and left to lie glassy-eyed in every meadow. (hawk.jpg) The brown soldiers rounded up the townsfolk and either executed them for being red collaborators, or marched them off to labor camps.
Pari had been a good hard worker. And what was left of her family--because they’d moved so much—they already knew how to march. It was carrying things along that had gotten so hard. That time they had left behind much more than usual. A baby brother, among other things.
They marched somewhere north, to a new labor camp. It was very cold, and Pari had wished they had not dropped so many of their warm things when it was so hot that summer. But the clothes had been too heavy to carry—it was either warm clothes or water, and in August, they had chosen water.
Pari kept reminding herself that in giuthi, you always have to empty your hand down to the very last seed before you get to pick up any new ones. With luck, you can plan your seeds so that the last seed falls into a full cup and not an empty one, and then you can scoop up what’s there and go on a bit longer.
Pari had wondered how much she had left before that last seed, and where it would fall.
At long last, the soldiers had ordered them to stop, and the exhausted workers obeyed gratefully, dropping to the hard pavement as if it were stuffed with feathers, and huddling into the scant shelter of a factory wall as if it were covered in warm stove tiles.
Their bivouac was unpleasant, and brief.
Little food, and little warmth, and then some villager from the town they were passing through pointed out the “No loitering” sign painted on the side of the building. To save face, the soldiers—the ones who had ordered them to halt there--arrested the lot of them for vagrancy. Two of the “ringleaders” were shot as an example, and the weary group marched on.
Pari marched away from her dead father with one less seed in her hand. She had not known that her hands could feel that empty. (warning.jpg)
The work camp was unspeakable.
One day when spring was almost in the wind, Pari’s mother and older sisters were transferred to another camp, and they marched away. Pari had never imagined that she would be one of the seeds left behind. She wondered which side would pick her up next, and realized she no longer had any idea who the players were.
Eventually—in the fall-- there were more soldiers, this time in green, with trucks. They captured the brown soldiers and the camp, brought food and medicines, cigarettes and chocolate, and then they turned Pari and some of the other camp workers over to the care of a textile mill owner, and left. The mill owner fed them and housed them, paid them wages for their labor, and then collected most all of it back for the food and rent.
In chess, Pari thought as she sat before her loom, the pieces are black or white, and each has a name, or at least a title. Captured or free, a pawn always knows what part she plays and which side she plays for. In giuthi, once a seed is dropped, it’s anybody’s piece to use or capture. Perhaps she had already been captured and dumped in one of the granaries, a piece no longer in play. Her purpose was no longer to keep moving. Her purpose now was simply to exist and be numbered.
If the factory was a black pit from which Pari never hoped to emerge, it was at least a place to be indoors while winter besieged the world outside.
When spring came, buyers came to the factory to inspect the plant and order shipments of rugs and other goods. Many were foreign, and spoke haltingly, or with thick accents. The factory owner would walk out to the floor and bellow “who speaks Belarusan?” or “who speaks English?” and Pari would peer through the strings of her loom and raise her hand. (weft.jpg)
Sometimes they picked someone else, but not often. Pari, it seemed, had lived more places than anyone. What was more, she knew how to translate without inserting her own opinions or comments. She was quiet, focused, discrete. A perfectly transparent conduit for communciation, pure as a lens.
After a while, the owner would just bellow “Send Pari,” without bothering to ask what tongue. If she didn’t know the tongue, she’d hunt for cognates in some language she did know, or use hand gestures, or draw pictures. Eventually, the parties always came to some understanding. It was good for business.
Translating was much more interesting than weaving. Pari learned a lot watching the men haggle. She could tell who would make a good bargain almost before he began. The mill owner was particularly skilled—a dignified and clever man who never caved to pressure once negotiations began in earnest. Bullies and cowards did not walk away with his best prices.
And then, one warm spring day, the soldier who had shot her father walked across the factory floor, and into the owner’s office. He wore a business suit now, but he had a face that Pari would never forget.
And the owner bellowed “Send Pari.”
Pari rose slowly from her loom. She walked slowly to the office, her hands numb with sudden chill.
A halo of cold seemed to have engulfed her, a shell of terrible ice. She was made of ice—her hands, her heart, her spine—transparent and bloodless—a shell to carry her frozen, voiceless tongue. She would walk into the room and be immobilized with fear, folded in on herself like the small round brittle thing she was.
She thought again of the glass seeds sitting in their little cups. In seeds—in real seeds—sometimes things grow.
The thing growing in her was pale and fierce. It had long sharp thorns that dripped poison.
She could see, could almost feel the black ichor of the man’s body smeared across her palms, her face. Surely a creature such as he carried no blood within him. Blood felt, blood cared, blood sang and wept and this man—he was no man. She would rip him open with her thorns and teeth and only darkness would dribble out. She would crush his skull with the chunks of her frozen heart. And perhaps there would be a tiny box in which what passed for his soul was carried. She would pluck it out and crush it and burn the scraps.
It would not be murder. It would be vengeance. (interrupted.jpg)
Pari stepped in to the room, and the icy shell around her black rage felt strong, impregnable.
The mill owner sat behind the desk in his green-walled office, the ex-soldier sat in the guest chair on the other side. They were sharing coffee.
As she hesitated in the doorway, the mill owner introduced himself, and she translated automatically the same introduction she had repeated so many times before.
The soldier blandly introduced himself to her. He did not recognize her. Why should he? There must have been so many faces, and hers had been so small.
“This is the criminal who shot my father,” Pari translated, her voice as mild as if she were speaking the gentleman’s name and business.
She heard it leave her mouth, and the small clink it made as it landed in the mill owner’s ears. Perhaps it was only the sound of him setting his coffee on the desk.
“My father was unarmed,” she clarified. “He was exhausted from carrying me, and this man shot him down in the street for resting. For loitering. For no reason at all.”
The mill owner nodded, and picked up the phone.
“There will be a delay while we complete your background and credit check,” she informed the soldier.
“You sure about this Pari?” the mill owner asked her as he waited for the line to connect. “This isn't going to be pretty. The war left so many criminals, it’s hard to find an honest official left to arrest or judge them. You'll have you hands full for a long while.”
“Yes,” she replied. “My hands will be full."
